FSFE Newsletter - October 2009

October has been a dense, vibrant and challenging month for FSFE.
We have done more work than will fit the limits of this letter.
For this reason, after reading the newsletter, please visit the
news section of our website to have a complete overview of our
work:

FSFE suggests to make MySQL independent as solution for Oracle/Sun deal

A lot of rumours spread during the last weeks about the acquisition of
Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Here, the Free Software community is
concerned for the future of MySQL. To shed some light on this issue,
FSFE's president, Karsten Gerloff, published a detailed analysis of the
key points involved in the acquisition. Following this analysis,
FSFE suggested that the best solution to allow the Oracle/Sun deal to
be finalized and secure a free future for MySQL is to make it independent.

Announcing FSFE's new Finnish country team

We are pleased to announce the formation of a new country team working
under the FSFE's umbrella: Otto Kekäläinen, Henri Bergius, and
Timo Jyrinki are the members of FSFE's Finnish team. They will work
respectively as team coordinator, deputy coordinator and Finnish
translation coordinator. All of them will participate in the
upcoming FSCONS, where they will meet other FSFE team members to discuss
the team's strategies for cooperation and for their growth in Finland.
To contact the Finnish team you can write an e-mail to:

Fellowship meetings in Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna

During the month, the regular Fellowship local meetings took place as
usual. German Fellows met in Frankfurt and in Berlin on the 7th and 8th
of October, while the Austrian Fellows held their usual monthly meeting
on the 16th. Main topics of the evenings have been: Free Software in
education, follow-up on the "Ask your candidate about Free Software!"
campaign, the Fellowship jabber meetings, and specific Free Software
projects Fellows are involved in. To get in touch with your local
Fellowship group or to start one in your own region, have a look at:

Windows 7 to hit consumers with known security problem

In October, the German federal IT security agency (BSI) issued a report
concerning a 'high-risk' vulnerability in Microsoft's SMB2-Protocol
which also affects Windows 7. Microsoft remained silent about this
warning and did not yet provide a solution to the problem. FSFE
published a press release to highlight that the company's bad practice
of ignoring high risk vulnerabilities is unfortunately the rule, not the
exception. With Free Software, users are not dependent on a single party
to fix such problems for them.

New Fellowship jabber server

In order to improve the services to FSFE's Fellows we recently replaced
our old jabber server with a new one based on ejabberd. After a testing
period, we are happy to announce that the new server is up and running!
This change will solve many of the problems that Fellows reported to us
during the past months. To take advantage, remember to update your
account settings!

Welcome to Alina Mierlus as intern

On 15 October, Alina Mierlus joined FSFE to start her internship. She
will work with us until mid-February 2010 from our new Berlin office
and will mainly focus on campaigns and events coordination. Alina is from
Romania and worked over the past six years advocating Free Software. She
says: "This internship offers me the opportunity to apply what I've
learned, but for a European Foundation. I've always believed that
campaigns, events and all the things that put people together are the
most important ways to have a healthy community."
Welcome on board Alina!

In the spotlight

EC vs MS: the browser and interoperability cases

The open issues that Microsoft has with the European Commission (EC) got
shaken up in October. The proposed solutions will not be helpful for
Free Software, so FSFE is keeping up the pressure on the EC.

Commissioner Neelie Kroes wants to close two important cases concerning
Microsoft before the end of her mandate at the Directorate General for
Competition (DG Comp): one case relates to the dominant position of the
company in the browser market, the other to the failure in providing
interoperability information for desktop applications.

FSFE is working to provide input to the Commission in order to make the
settlements as fair as possible for all the actors in the software
market, Free Software included. In the past weeks, we already explained
why we believe that the current details of the settlements are not
satisfactory and provided feedback to the Commissioner. We will soon
deliver a new formal comment concerning the updated version of the
settlements to the Commission.

It happened in the past

Fellows discuss the future of the Fellowship portal

Two years ago, the Fellows of FSFE started a lively discussion on the
future of the Fellowship portal. The discussion covered the use of
forums, calenders, mailing lists, jabber accounts and other services,
and it was one of the landmarks that brought the Fellowship platform to
the current and improved version.

Upcoming events

This year, the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS) in
Lindholmen (Göteborg), Sweden, will be co-organised by FSFE and the
Fellows. Beside the participation of Karsten Gerloff, FSFE's president, Adriaan
de Groot, Freedom Task Force coordinator, who will hold talks, the
Fellows will organise workshops and panels.

FSFE to launch the Fellowship grants project

Thanks to FSFE's donors and tarent GmbH in particular, we will be able
to award three Fellowship grants each month for one year. These grants
will cover the Fellowship contribution for people who have done
exceptional things to bring Free Software forward, and will be awarded
after evaluation of the individual applications. Candidacies can be
submitted to fellowship@fsfeurope.org. In December, we will announce
the first three people who will receive the grants.